Pam Buttram started off sending her children to public district schools, but when her older son, who has special needs, started getting put into a seclusion room, she knew she had to pull him out and homeschool if he was going to have any chance at success.
“There’s a padded closet they’ll put the kids in if they’re having a meltdown,” she said. “Kids with neurological problems will have a meltdown pretty easily. In his case doing handwriting skills would cause a meltdown and rather than not making him do handwriting skills, he had to. So we knew they were sneaking around and putting him into that classroom and that there would be no real education happening at that point.
“In order to save our child, we started homeschooling him and it’s the best thing we ever did,” said Pam. “I homeschooled him through senior year of high school and then my other son who has had no health problems was homeschooled until about ninth grade and then he went to a public school. He was ahead of his peers and that’s what’s kind of sad, my boys are ahead of their peers because they were self-taught. They were able to follow their curiosity.
Pam said her experience is just one example of why Missouri needs more school choice options for families.
“The more choices we have the better education will become,” she said. “The more competition we have, the more ideas going out there, the more opportunities we have for our kids, I just don’t see that choice can ever be a bad thing.”